Cost cutting is finite (as a sustainable strategy), whereas value creation for customers is infinite.
Professor Malcolm McDonald, renowned marketing expert
Tag: strategy
Strategy is about deciding what to change
No change in behaviour, no change in results
Alex M H Smith, strategist
‘Strategy’ means doing the right things. ‘Tactics’ means doing things right.
Professor Malcolm McDonald, renowned marketing expert
‘Best practice’ is just a pleasanter way of saying ‘what all the other shitheads are doing.’
Bob Hoffman, advertising legend
Be outrageous if you want to stand out
If you want a name in fashion you’ll need millions of dollars in ads. And it’ll take years. But if you want to be recognized tomorrow, we need something outrageous.
Advertising legend George Lois’ advice to Tommy Hilfiger, when Hilfiger was a new fashion designer.
Marketing strategy is about working on the edge
“A good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. It is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge. Only there are found the opportunities to keep us ahead of rivals. There is no avoiding it. The uneasy sense of ambiguity you feel [when developing strategy] is real. It is the scent of opportunity … Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true. It is a dumb request … A good strategy, in the end, is a hypothesis about what will work.
In a world of change and flux, doing more of the same is rarely the right answer. In a changing world, good strategy must embody some ideas or insights into new combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities. The problem with dealing with strategy as a crank-winding exercise is that systems of deduction and computation do not produce new, interesting ideas, no matter how hard one winds the crank … stating a new theorem is a profoundly creative act.”
Richard Rumelt, strategy expert
A brand without trust is just a product, and a product can be replaced
Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever
The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.
Bob Iger, Chairman – Disney
There may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?
Andrey Ivanov, Business Games podcast
Ritson on Brand Positioning
“There are only two brand goals: 1) do you know I exist? I want 100% of my target audience to know I exist; … and 2) what do I want to mean and stand for to those customers that know I exist?
What do you want your customer to think about when they think about your brand? I’ll give you three things. Pick three things. That’s your positioning.”
Professor Mark Ritson
Bite-Sized Marcomms 